Borders are not only the fortified limes designed to separate civilisation from the Barbaricum or to constitute a line drawn between dominions. A border, as it is traditionally understood, whether political or cultural, should be a closed, peripheral zone that is easy to define and identify. Reality is, of course, far more complex than traditional conceptual models. For many years, research into the areas in-between has moved away from studies on conflict, focusing instead on influence, exchange, and cultural transmission.1
Borders are places for trading, which is covered extensively in this volume by authors such as Piotr Pranke and Felix Biermann. Borders are also areas of cultural transmission, illustrated in particular by Florin Curta and Dušan Zupka. After all, borders are not peripheral; they are areas that often develop their own identity and sometimes a syncretic culture, as demonstrated by Ivan Basić as well as by Andrzej Pydyn and Konrad Lewek, who focus on the Piast dynasty. Borders are also zones of tension and conflict – military, economic, and cultural – as clearly indicated by Kirił Marinow and Georgios Kardaras.
The present volume deals with interdisciplinary boundaries and includes texts focusing on material culture, philological analysis, and historical research. What they all have in common are zones that lie in between, treated not as mere barriers but also as places of exchange, and the period referred to by some as late antiquity or the early Middle Ages.
Studies devoted to the genesis of early forms of state in central, eastern, and northern Europe refer to a rich historiographic tradition and a range of model approaches found in the literature. These traditions and models define how the systems of power organisation were perceived and expressed in this area. They increasingly include non-linear and non-revolutionary concepts, referring to the processes of stabilisation and destabilisation of power, the trend towards anthropologising considerations, and the post-Pyrenean concept regarding the importance of economic factors in the process of shaping organisational and state structures. They also refer to a collection of phenomena associated with borderlands negotiating with hubs of a central nature – illustrating the parallel influence of so-called world systems on semi-peripheral and peripheral areas. In this way – on ideological, political, and economic grounds and in the sphere of elite exchange or mutual social and cultural influences – they also designate border zones between the world of great empires and Barbaricum.
The research questions presented in this book by experts in their fields relate to how state power was defined, how the fiscal and military apparatus were organised, and what the turning point in the division of dynastic power – assimilating certain symbolic and ideological elements of the imperial tradition – meant. So, what did the borderlands signify for the changing political and military organisations? What significance did the functioning of former borderland areas have when the routes they formed belonged to a bygone era? How important were they for the functioning of the military machine? Finally, what exactly was “statehood without a state” when it came to semi-peripheral and peripheral areas that were also perceived through the prism of the idea of a world system, network theory, or the concept of so-called negotiating borderlands? These are the main questions posed in this book, which several established scholars from different countries attempt to answer from a number of different perspectives.
Note
· 1 Mention should be made here of Sara M. Butler, K. J. Kesserling, eds., Crossing Borders: Boundaries and Margins in Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Cynthia J. Neville (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018); David Abulafia and Nora Berend, eds., Medieval Frontiers: Concepts and Practices (Abington and New York: Routledge, 2016); Michael C. Howard, Transnationalism in Ancient and Medieval Societies: The Role of Cross-Border Trade and Travel (Jefferson and London: McFarland, 2012); Alan V. Murray and Anne Huijbers, eds., The Clash of Cultures on the Medieval Baltic Frontier (London and New York: Rout-ledge, 2009); and Ulrich Knefelkamp and Kristian Bosselmann-Cyran, eds., Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung im Mittelalter (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007).